


Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

by Adira_Tyree



Series: Fallout: Returning Home [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Caesar's Legion, Characters to be added, Freeside, Gen, Ghouls, History, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, The Strip, the rot, westside, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-09-03 02:12:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8692426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adira_Tyree/pseuds/Adira_Tyree
Summary: If you ask any ghoul what it was like before, you'll get a different story out of each of them. Before the Legion; before the war; before they were pushed from their homes and forced to found a new district in New Vegas all their own; before House brought the tribes to rule in his stead. If you take the time to listen, you can learn the city's secrets from those who were there to witness its rebirths and told they were not worthy of it all. All you have to do is ask.
They remember.





	1. Beatrix Russell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Tell me what it was like before the Legion came, when they took over.”
> 
> Beatrix laughed out something between a sob and a cackle, choking out, “you just go right for the fun ones, don’t you? I bet if you ask any of us, we’d all give you a different story of what it was like when they came. But I suppose you might as well start with one from me…”

The air was already thick with smoke by the time Beatrix gave up hope of an NCR victory. She was used to the way smoke burned at the remains of her nose and stung her shredded throat and lungs, but she wasn’t used to the feeling of her stomach dropping so hard she looked down to be sure it hadn’t _really_ fallen out. It was just a mixture of chemicals, she reminded herself. High-school-level biochemistry. Adrenaline being released, somewhat haphazardly at this point in her life, into her bloodstream in relation to the fight-or-flight response, mixing into a heart-pounding stress cocktail with cortisol – garnished with slight oxygen-deprivation from forgetting to breathe. Which, in other words, meant she was scared to shit and back at the idea of the Legion marching on New Vegas within moments.

First it was the silence. The terrible silence of it after the NCR’s few vertibirds had fled back to safer territory. No more constant gunfire. No explosions in the distance to light the horizon in the night. But worse than the silence was the shouts of victory that followed, carrying on the wind as they came for the city.

She’d quit her job at the Wrangler in anticipation of this moment. There’d be no legal whoring in the city after they came anyway. It had been a fun chapter while it lasted, but this was going to be a whole different kind of book soon. Like many of the other ghouls in the city, she’d sought out the Followers for refuge – which was gladly offered, though none assumed it would do much of them any good. If they were still standing by morning, they’d all be surprised.

Except for Raul.

Raul was convinced it wouldn’t be a real problem for them. He’d explained that he’d lived in Legion territory before without problems. So long as everyone did what they were supposed to, it didn’t matter if they were ghouls or smoothskins. They were just teeth on a gear to Caesar, some more worn than others.

Frankly, Beatrix didn’t give a damn what Raul had to say on the subject. It all sounded like bullshit to her. But she remembered that this gut-wrenching feeling of terror and dread was not unlike what she’d felt at the end of the world, when the war began and ended in the same moment. She’d survived the first time around, she’d be damned if she didn’t survive this one.

This time was different, though. This time there were enemy soldiers marching in the streets, barking orders in a language she didn’t understand. This time they came and took what they had been after, instead of bombing it to shit. And at the middle of it all was that damned Courier. Son-of-a-gun got himself pretty far up in the ranks pretty damn fast with his silver tongue and calculating gaze. Farther than anyone had expected in Freeside, that was for sure.

One of the first matters of business had been the official taking of the city. With no one brave enough to fight back, there wasn’t much to do beyond a ceremony. Leave it to the Legion to take a city with ceremony; they didn’t need their swords to force submission. It was already theirs when they arrived.

Still, the Courier had apparently decided that it would be best to do things formally. “I, Caesar Tabellarius, take the city in the name Caesar before me, Caesar Primus, who fell on this great day, on the battlegrounds on which we fought for that which he held so dear to this Legion. Today, New Vegas becomes not just the next great city in Caesar’s territories, but an even greater version of itself. Together I hope that we can bring this great city into a new golden age, an age…”

Beatrix couldn’t bring herself to listen anymore. Even years later she would look back on that moment and realized that she hadn’t heard the words the Courier had said from that point on, nor did she care. He’d spoken beautiful words, with gore still clinging to his shoulders, and blood running down his arms. On either side of him were men whose names she would come to know better than she ever wanted: Vulpes Inculta - the master spies, and Lucius Protegat - the captain of the Caesarian guard. Both would soon become familiar faces in New Vegas, both following the new Caesar and doing his bidding at all hours of the day and night.

She, like many of the ghouls, found that she already recognized Inculta; the master spies had made himself quite the opposite of scarce in the months leading up to this moment. But the days of doing his dirty work himself were now over. Instead, he became almost a sort of master librarian; nearly every name, every place, and every line he’d drawn on every map that showed where materials could be found became instantly critical, needing to be remembered at the Courier’s slightest whim. In title, he turned from Master of Spies to Master Craftsman, though he knew little about swinging a hammer himself. It couldn’t be all that different than hacking away with a machete though, could it?

It was these new craftsmen’s work, at first, that was the most visible. Though the Legion had convinced the Kings to stay and continue to police the city as they had before, Caesar too would have men guarding the city. Legionaries patrolled the streets day and night, on both sides of every wall. Troops were moved from inside the forts walls to the bunks inside McCarran, and though the monorail fell immediately into disuse, groups of soldiers were seen marching from McCarran’s gates to the gates of Freeside and back at any hour. Some of these men belonged to Lucius. Some of these men belonged to Inculta. It didn’t fucking matter to Beatrix who they belonged to, so long as they left her alone. There were now eyes all over the city where they had never been before.

For Beatrix, this meant that most of her old hideouts were no longer private. When Inculta’s craftsmen began tearing down the most destroyed buildings in order to reuse the materials and reconstruct ones in better shape, it meant that most of her old hideouts no longer existed at all.

After the first few days, what truly surprised her was the lack of terrorizing that went on. While it was true that most women preferred to hide inside their homes, most of the time the Legionaries were too busy with their work to bother with the civilians inside the city. The guards were not so much easy to provoke as they were disgusted by _profligate behavior_. And it wasn’t until a list of laws for the city was drawn up by Caesar and those closest to him that they bothered to go into the bars in Freeside and remove all banned substances away to the Strip. Surprisingly, they hadn’t simply destroyed them.

In fact, the most immediate problem after the Legion’s arrival, was that other citizens of Freeside immediately pushed back against any and all ghouls in the city. _Freaks that should have died forever ago anyway_ didn’t deserve to have nice homes, not when there were good, smooth-skinned people who needed them. They went from second-class citizens to rats being shooed out of homes. Beatrix, like many of them, fought for what had been theirs in the city since before many of its residents had been born. It wasn’t until Rotface had been shot in the arm at such close range with a shotgun that the arm had to be removed that they realized this was a battle they weren’t winning, too.

The War, the Battles of Hoover Dam, they had both been larger scale, wars that simply sucked up anyone and anything in their paths. This was personal. This was against them and them alone. And there was no one who would stand and fight for a ghoul when they had their own families to protect instead.

Fuckers.

They’d survive it, one way or another, like they had each war before. But it was the war with the Legion that changed everything, bringing the ghouls together in a way they hadn’t been before. All she could do was hope they’d be stronger for it.

Just high-school-level biochemistry. Adrenaline. Cortisol. Oxygen. _Breathe._


	2. Jason Bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The question had caught him off-guard, though its subject was something that was constantly on his mind. What was different before the Legion came? Well, the short answer was simply: everything.

The concept of a glowing one that wasn’t feral was a scientific improbability. There were parts of Jason that ached to name it an impossibility, but you didn’t use words like that around a team. It didn’t matter what kind of team either; if you wanted them to work for something, you didn’t tell them it couldn’t happen. That didn’t mean he believed it could happen, regardless.  

To him, a miracle was nothing different from a great cosmic joke. If it happened and couldn’t be explained by modern thinking, that didn’t mean it was impossible – it meant that your perception of reality was unavoidably incorrect, and needed to be altered. So when he became the first non-feral glowing one that anyone seemed to have known of, he reminded himself not to discount the improbable as impossible, and carried on. 

Those around him were not nearly so forgiving when it came to cosmic jokes such as this. The idea of “The Plan” had never even been his own, but rather something fed to him by all the ghouls around him. "The Plan" was bizarre and put him up on a pedestal that he didn't want to be standing on. But somehow the improbability of his own existence had become a miracle to some of them, and that meant that the cosmos were on their side. It meant that ghouls were _meant_ to survive, somehow somewhere. 

How that somewhere turned into _SPACE_ he had absolutely no idea.  

In some ways it made sense. Ghouls were at their best in an area flooded with radiation. Space had all sorts of radiation. Space didn't, to their knowledge at least, have smoothskins hunting them down and attempting to exterminate them. It followed in that line that space would be better for them than the wasteland. No smoothskins, lots of radiation. There were, however, a few practical issues to be dealt with – mainly food, air, and water. Not to mention either an infinite supply of energy or somewhere to land and something to build there.  

For the most part, Jason was happy it hadn't worked out – it had been a fool's errand in the first place. Being together as a community was the important part. He wouldn't exactly say that it was the Legion that brought them together the way they were now, but they had played a part in it at least. There were those who still held resentment, and who wouldn't resent those who destroyed their life's work, but now that the vanity clouding his vision had cleared even he could see that life spent being hated in one corner of a city together was better than life alone with only a handful of others in space.  

Sometimes the whole idea of it all made him laugh. How had it even happened? No, he'd answered that question as well. He'd allowed others to believe that he was impossible, and they had managed to convince him that it made him special. The rest of it all? "The Plan?" That was pure sociological slag. The real miracle was that none of them had been killed when the Legion came for them.  

The day the Legion closed the Repconn facility had been a blur. A man who, from what he could tell, was a Courier named Caesar had calmly explained to them that the territory surrounding the facility had been taken over by a massive army. That army had, supposedly, no quarrel with the ghouls, but they could not allow the technology there to continue being accessible to anyone who made it inside the front door. This included the ghouls, though all they wanted was to use it to leave the area. And while they were allowed to leave with their lives, and even allowed into New Vegas, they were forced to abandon everything they'd spent so long working towards. He still held some solace in the fact that it hadn't simply been destroyed, but for some that made it worse. It was all still there waiting for them.  

"Remember that they too will turn to dust," Jason reminded them often, "and that they will do so long before any of us will. We will return and we will reach the sacred place one day. We must be patient." For the "pious" among them, this was enough – a comfort. For the others, it was a reminder that they couldn't just start a war against the Legion and fight their way back into Repconn. For himself it was simply a repetitive mantra that, if spoken aloud to an empty room, meant nothing at all. One scientific improbability was rare to experience in a lifetime, and though he'd already lived several lifetimes due to it, he didn't expect to experience another. 

Before the Legion came was a time that he'd allowed himself to become enamored with the idea that one improbability would easily follow on to another, and another, and another. That he was possible meant they could make the rockets work, they could find a way to survive, they could find somewhere to live out their days in peace, that they would all live to see it. After? Afterward he remembered that they probably wouldn't. He kept his feet on the ground and his eyes on what was in front of him. The sky would still be there tomorrow if he wanted to look up.  

"It was a very different world for those of us from the Repconn facility," he told her. "One where nothing was impossible and the very stars were within our grasp. Our fingers reached out towards the infinite blackness, and the Legion pushed the sky away at the last possible moment. We must grow now in order to reach for it with confidence again." 

He did not want to look up. 


	3. Private Kyle Edwards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The idea of "before" as one that Kyle didn't like remembering. It was also something he couldn't forget - and he wasn't sure which was worse.

Everything was different back in those days. He was human, for one. And he gave a shit about the NCR, too. He’d even given them his loyalty for life, signing up for the NCR military as a trooper. They’d fed him their propaganda like mother’s milk, and he’d greedily suckled it down without remorse – at the time. In 2281 it soured in his stomach, leaving him empty and alone as he rotted inside and out.  

Part of him was almost grateful to the Legion for it. Without their “intervention” he would not have known the Republic for the wolves it was made of. Would not have guessed that it was in their nature to forsake those who were mutated by the warm glow of radiation. That they would gun down living, breathing men still mentally capable and willing to fight on in the name of the Bear.  

At least he understood it with the ferals – there was nothing that could be done for them anymore, and it was the most dignified end for their lives to say that the radiation killed them. But he was still _alive_ , aware, and more than anything he was ready to fight back against the Legion who’d turned him into a _freak_. But the first thing his troop did was send someone in to put him down, like a sick dog being put out of its misery.  

“I am no dog,” he’d mutter to himself. “I am no dog and I need no help.” Every night like a mantra he’d say it to himself until he fell asleep. Sometimes he’d wake with nightmares, shooting up in bed and shouting it at the top of his lungs. He'd repeat it over and over until he choked on sobs and collapsed into a puddle of his own tears and couldn't speak anymore. That was until he stopped needing to sleep every night. Now he whispered it under his breath, to everything and to no one, at all hours of the day and night.  

The worst part of it all was that the Legion was more than happy to let him exist in their cities, so long as he caused no trouble. The fact that he was willing to work and contribute to society made them downright amicable towards him. It was disgusting, if only because the NCR would never have let him take up a role in society the way the Legion did. Even the Muties could come and go as they pleased, though there were no Nightkin any longer to speak of – their dependencies on StealthBoys being their own undoing in the end. None of them, not Nightkin, not Supermutants, and not fucking _Ghouls_ , were welcome in the nice, clean cities of the Republic. The idea alone was repulsive to them. _Think of the children!_ As though exposure to other races would leave them dirty and tainted. Stained in a way that couldn’t be scrubbed off.  

Even _being_ a ghoul somehow wasn't as bad as the NCR knowing it. He was pretty sure his family thought he'd died in the attack on Searchlight, meaning his sister had cried and cried about how she knew he'd never come home again if he left them. His father was even emptier now, having lost both his wife and his son. The little boy from the house next door wouldn't get the Legion coin he'd promised to bring home with him. He'd never see any of his friends again. Or Anna.  

Oh what she would do if she knew he was a ghoul. It was probably better that she thought he was dead, then at least she could remember him as the reasonably good-looking guy he'd left home as. Maybe she'd even find someone else, someone with the good sense to stay out of the army. Without pride in his country.  

Kyle had been a true patriot, having signed up for war before the draft came through and shipped out to the front to tackle the Legion head on. Fat lot of good it'd done him; he came within spitting distance of the camp that Caesar himself stayed in, and never even managed to take out a single Legionary. They'd destroyed his life and left him breathing without him even seeing them.  

He had a nose back then – a rather long and pointed one at that. Some of the boys in his patrol unit had even taken to calling him Nose. Having lived with the teasing all his life, Kyle just told them it was all the better for sniffing out Legionaries with, and that once they hit Cottonwood he'd be able to hunt down every last one there. Now he was a ghoul and his nose had shriveled up and rotted away. Now instead of hunting down Legionaries, he spent his days standing in front of a gate, behind which lived people he'd lived much of his life being told to hate. Ghouls, Legionaries, Tribals – all dirty words in his mother tongue. All people he interacted with on a daily basis now. 

Before the Legion came he knew which way was up and whether or not someone was goor or bad just by looking at them. Now? Now all he had to go on was the theory that "good people" were just a bedtime story. That everyone was bad, with bits and pieces that were tolerable in them. Ghouls, Legionaries, Tribals, NCR, Smoothskins. All of them were fucking awful for one reason or another. The reasons didn't really matter. For whatever reason, he was alive. If Ghouls and Legionaries and Tribals were willing to leave him that way but the NCR and the Smoothskins weren't? He knew which brands of "bad people" he preferred out of that mix.  

"Well," Kyle said with a wild grin, "I wasn't nearly so handsome, and I probably wouldn't have been willing to speak to you. It's all a matter of perspective – and you lose a lot of your visual range as you age as a ghoul." Maybe it was just him that was so miserable about it all – after all, he was the youngest ghoul around for miles until the kid, GiGi, showed up. Aside from Roxxi, of course, but with her it wasn't much of a contest to see who was aging with more grace. It had been almost 20 years and he still felt sick to his stomach every time he saw his own skin, like all that remained of Private Kyle Edwards was a rotting shell. He had nothing left, and no one to share it with.  

That was why he stood guard at the gate. Because it paid, and it didn't matter one way or the other anymore if he died right there on that very spot. He suspected that Charon felt much the same; they both had the instinct to survive, but lacked the will to live.   

"It's too bad you're a tribal," he said, grinning, then added, "...and it's too bad I'm a ghoul."  _But I'm not a ghoul._


	4. Charon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "So what was it like..." Cal asked, trailing off and gesturing vaguely, but Charon only quirked a brow. "You know... before?"
> 
> "Before _what_?"
> 
> She blinked, realizing she wasn't really even sure. "I dunno..." She shook her head, shrugging. "Just... before."

_Before?_  

Charon didn’t know what it was like “before _the Legion_.” He had blocked out anything “before _the war_.” The only “before” he remembered at all was “before _Roxxi_.” 

“Before Roxxi” consisted of moments and flashes of memory more than full stories. Shooting another ghoul over something petty at a bar. A man dangling a scrap of old paper in front of him like meat before a caged deathclaw. Being given an order and following it without question, regardless of his thoughts on the actions he would be performing. The slow process of removing gore from his weathered skin, as to keep it from rotting into him. The daily regimen of cleaning his weapons, whatever they were at the time. 

“Before Roxxi” didn’t matter until she had taken his contract and stuffed it into her own little pocket and taken him from Underworld like Orpheus himself tried to do with Eurydice. Only, Roxxi didn’t look back. She’d understood that he would follow her, for one reason or another. Even, after months of traveling together, when she’d burned his contract before his very eyes, he continued to follow her. He’d told her that burning the contract simply meant it could not be removed from her by force. 

What he’d meant was that he’d found someone he’d follow _regardless_ of the contract. 

One of his favorite memories was of when she destroyed his contract with her words - told him he was all his own, except for the fact that she wanted him all for herself too. In his typically blunt way, and not with any hint of romance in his tone, he told her she had him. He didn’t need to flatter her with honeyed words for her to know what he meant by it.  

Then she’d done for the Capital Wasteland the same selfless type of kindness she’d done for him. She saved them from being victims of circumstance. In the end, it cost him everything.  

The first years weren’t too bad. They figured out fairly quickly what was happening to her. At just 19, her body had been resilient enough to live when flooded with radiation, but weak enough to begin the slow process of ghoulification. He hadn’t ever wanted that life for her, his life, but at the time he’d thought there were far worse potential outcomes. She’d stand by his side even longer now, if luck would let her.  

Tyche was not on Roxxi’s side. 

The first years weren’t easy for her. The process of _becoming_ was a painful one, for anyone – but she’d never known for most of her life that ghoulification was even possible. She hid her fear well, but Charon knew what to look for in her. The nervous twitch in her fingers as she carefully tucked her fragile hair behind her ear; the way she laughed off every new little “problem” as her body changed; the way her gaze flicked from one thing to another, never settling for even half a moment.  

One of her father’s friends, the female doctor that Charon had never quite trusted, tried for years, in vain, to find a way to slow the progress of Roxxi’s transformation. Eventually she too was convinced that there was nothing that could be done for her. At least not in the Capital Wasteland. It wasn’t until several years after the woman’s abrupt departure from Rivet City that either of them heard from her again. And it was after Roxxi had begun having her “episodes.”  

The first episode was brief, so much so that they didn’t realize until calculating back later on. She’d been conversing with a trader, haggling back and forth over the price of something she’d used as decoration in her home in Megaton, and simply zoned out mid-sentence. Her words slowed until they stopped altogether, and something about the way her gaze changed – like she was just now seeing him and needed to examine him, determine if the man was a threat – suggested she was no longer mentally there.  

It lasted only a few moments the first time, and they chalked it up to simple lack of sleep and too much travel in a day. But it kept happening. Out talking with people, at home with no one around but him; episodes didn’t seem to care who was there to witness them. Charon guessed that they happened when she was alone as well, if her sudden habit of burning food and dropping things was any indication.  

There were other changes as well, though they didn’t stand out as anything abnormal. After her scalp had rid itself of the last vestiges of her once luxurious and long dark hair, she dug herself halfway through the DC ruins to find a shop that sold wigs. From there she made off with a small collection of them in colors natural and unnatural – everything from her own dark brown color to one in an amazingly brilliant shade of red.  

The red one turned into a fast favorite. She tended to wear it curled, then tucked up on the back of her head with a bandana tied around it so that the swirls of hair faced the sky. It was part of an ensemble that was becoming more and more common as her daily attire – a knee-length dress bits of combat armor strapped on overtop. Much to Charon’s dismay, she always neglected to wear the chest plate and the helmet.  

The catalyst came on a day just like any other. Nothing special to stand out, no omens warning them of the troubles to come. In the midst of a fight, some pack of raiders or another had decided to try and take Megaton for themselves, she let out her first feral roar. It wasn’t a battle cry, and it wasn’t a shout of frustration. It gurgled and bubbled in her throat, eyes unfocused and teeth bared, and she charged forward towards a group of them, not even a knife in her hands. Shotgun bursts took care of all but the one she’d tackled to the ground before Charon even realized she was shooting at them. Without a clear shot at him, he had to let her do… whatever it was she was doing. Which, he realized too late to stop her, was tearing the raider’s throat out with her fingernails. Efficient, but gruesome. She’d regret it later if she remembered doing it.  

Thankfully, she didn’t. But that didn’t bode well for her, either. 

It was time to find Dr. Li.  

Boston’s wasteland was, though full of dangers new and old, more forgiving than the Capital. Super Mutants were rare, no trace of the Enclave could even be found in ruin, and the war between the Brotherhood and the Institute was easy enough to keep their noses out of. Ferals gave them no grief, even the most far gone recognizing their kin with a simple sniff of their noses, and a woman everyone seemed to refer to as “The General” was keeping the raiders at bay. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know just where they could enter the Institute, thus they couldn’t find Dr. Li. 

But the General, who Charon found to be not at all unlike Roxxi herself, agreed to deliver a message to Li if she ever found the place. To their surprise, Dr. Li showed up at their doorstep in the General’s village of Sanctuary only a few months later.  

To their dismay, the news wasn’t good. The only suggestion she gave was to transfer Roxxi’s consciousness into a synth, a risky process at best, and something that to Roxxi herself was even more terrifying than becoming a ghoul. Synths weren’t exactly new to Roxxi, but having only ever ran into one – and one that looked and acted perfectly human at that – she’d never really believed in them. To suddenly learn that anyone average person she spoke to might not be what they appeared? It was more than she could deal with in the same afternoon as someone suggesting she turn herself into one. It sent her reeling into her worst episode yet, forcing Charon to lock her into their temporary home alone with him until he could calm her down. 

From there it was just a matter of finding someone with other ideas. 

Their first stop was in the south, where instead of avoiding Super Mutants or Deathclaws the real trouble was Swamplurks. An old pre-war hospital housed a group of researchers that called themselves Bay-Hearts told her they would love to take some blood samples and see what they could learn, but that it could take them years to find anything they could do for her. Roxxi stayed for a month, giving them all the blood they could possibly hope for, before taking off for the west to find the NCR.  

To get to the NCR and the famed Followers of the Apocalypse, there were two different routes they could travel. Neither were optimal. The shortest route was to cut a path as directly as they could through Legion territory, and hope that they weren’t enslaved or hung up on crosses to rot in the desert sun. The other option would be to skirt around thousands of miles of their territory going north and west, then immediately cut down south once they were far enough to avoid the Legion. The former was far more dangerous immediately, the latter potentially far more dangerous in the long run. 

In the end, they decided that if she didn’t find them soon it wouldn’t matter if she went up on a cross or not. 

Despite warnings from nearly every settlement as they worked westward, their being ghouls made them an entirely separate class of citizen in Legion territory. Though most Legionaries gave Charon more than a few second glances, they ultimately decided that, as ghouls, they weren’t worth the trouble of trying to sell. They were defective models. For once it seemed to be working out in their favor. They weren’t worth the money to enslave, and they weren’t worth the energy to kill. So long as they kept moving, no one gave them trouble. 

Though her episodes weren’t as frequent as they had been before, by the time they reached the Mojave it was clear their journey was nearing its end. Each new episode lasted longer than the one before it, making it harder and harder for them to travel.    
They couldn’t rest in cities anymore, not even at night since Roxxi had taken to waking up in the morning already mid-episode. They found empty places, even out under the stars when they had to, where they wouldn’t have to worry about something setting her off. If they were alone, it didn’t matter if she were feral.  

It sickened Charon to watch as parts of her mind disintegrated – quite literally. Despite her heightened senses and aggressive responses, and even her lost ability to formulate sentences, she was still Roxxi. She still wanted to curl in against his chest when she laid down to rest, still pressed her cheek to his shoulder when she was frustrated and wanted to calm down. The worst part of it was that he could see she wanted to speak to him, but she couldn’t find ways to connect her mouth and her brain. Some nights she’d growl and gurgle and try to turn nonsense into phrases until she cried, unable to tell him even the simplest of things. 

When they reached the New Vegas outpost for the Followers of the Apocalypse, they could go no further. Worse, the Followers had nothing they could do for her. But one woman, an independent researcher named Keely who lived in a section of the city called The Rot, said she would work the rest of her life trying to find something that could be done for ferals if she had to. It was the best offer they were going to get. So, with the approval of The Rot’s unofficial leader, a glowing non-feral named Jason Bright, they stayed.  

Now they were in _after._   

After was when she stopped having episodes at all and was slowly becoming fully feral. It wouldn’t be long, Charon was sure of that. There were days where she didn’t want to put on a dress and hair and sunglasses, days where she just sat and stared as though there wasn’t a world around her at all. It meant that instead of being traveling companions, he was her full-time care-taker: something not quite feasible if they had to find a way to survive.  

Keeley’s partner – both in romance and in research – started spending hours on end with Roxxi, allowing Charon to find work in the city to support himself and Roxxi.  Mac found a spring of infinite patience with Roxxi. Sometimes he’d read to her, sometimes he’d play familiar music on a worn-out guitar, and when he sensed she needed it he left her alone. He knew enough to not try to force her into having a conversation; he’d seen ghouls go feral before and tried to help them as well. All that would do was frustrate her into a hyper-aggressive state that was damn near impossible to pull her out of. It was obvious that Roxxi wasn’t the first feral he’d cared for, but Charon didn’t really want to bring up the topic. Even with it constantly at the front of his mind, he didn’t want to think about what going feral meant for a ghoul. 

So Charon spent the day with her, and Mac kept her company at night. It made the nights longer, by far, being away from her and not knowing exactly how she was doing. Even though he knew she was being cared for and was in good hands, he wanted to be there to protect her himself. More than that, he wanted to shield her from the pity of others, of ghouls who saw in her a spark that burned too bright and thus too fast, and spoke of how they wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Ones who didn’t understand that “feral” was a wide spectrum, a timeline – not a simple yes or no checkbox on a clipboard. She didn’t want to be pitied. She didn’t want to see their sad eyes and shaking heads. But until he found a song that brought tears to the eyes of Hades, even Charon had to bow to the inevitable conclusion that they all knew was coming for her.  

What was it like before the Legion took New Vegas?  

 _Who even fucking care_ _s_ _?_  


End file.
